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Bees - Man’s second best friend

By Navvab Munirih

Saturday Sounds

Once a very, very long time ago, when I was waiting to board a Grayhound bus heading south from Chicago, I accidently brushed up against a cluster of clover and wild flowers. I never even saw nor heard the bee, whose life was taken by stinging me that afternoon, nor have I seen many since. That was my first one-on-one experience with nature’s pollinators.

After recently becoming a master gardener here in Boone County, I ventured several weeks ago to Fieldstone Farms in Clemons, where Dale Fields and Eli Kalke were facilitating a beekeeping workshop in their apiary. But as I suited up, as the only non-beekeeper, in a netted hat moving ever closer to thousands of bees, I questioned was it my interest in the bee colony collapse disorder that could endanger our food supply or was it my greed for the golden honey and bee pollen that brought me here? It was both.

I truly adore honey. I use it as a main sweetener, alongside unsulphered blackstrap molasses and agave nectar, from the Blue Agave desert plant, and take bee pollen as a nutritious protein-vitamin supplement. When I was coming down with a cold and sore throat, honey and lemon were my mother’s mainstay natural remedy. Honey has always been a part of my life and health, and yet I knew very little about the creatures who make it.

There are 20,000 different kinds of bees living everywhere in the world except Antarctica. There is the Green Metallic, Carpenter, Mining, Mason and the giant Bumble Bee, Black Stingless, the Leaf Cutter, Giant Asian and the African Honeybees, and this diversity continues, the most famous being the honeybee. The strains of honeybees vary, some common ones are Italians, Germans, Carnolians, Caucasians and African. Some bee species are social, living in complex societies, others remain solitary.

Humanity has had a long, rich history with the honey bee. The origins of these bees might have been somewhere in Southeast Asia. The earliest fossil remains of a bee were found in Burma in a piece of amber believed to be dating back 100 million years ago. Even the ancient Neolithic tribes indulged in the sweet goodness of honey and honey combs. In the Bronze Age, people fermented honey to make mead, probably the first alcoholic drink. According to Eva Crane in “The World History of BeeKeeping and Honey Hunting,” “Honey gathering and beekeeping may have started as far back as 20,000 B.C.E.”

The first in establishing the art of beekeeping in the ancient world were the Egyptians somewhere along the Nile around 2400 B.C. Near Valencia, Spain, there were discovered rock paintings of a woman gathering honey from a tree circa 6,000 B.C. The Greeks minted the honeybee image on their coins. Romans painted pictures with dyed beeswax. Beeswax has been a treasured commodity as a medium of exchange, even in the payment of taxes. Honey and beeswax have been used by ancients for medicinal purposes in treating burns, wounds and as antibacterial agents.

In the 1620s, the immigrant settlers brought the European bee to the New World. Already there were 5,000 other species of pollinators. Because these honeybees lived in large organized hives around one queen, they could be easily transported from field to orchard, becoming the American farmer/agriculturist’s best friend.

Bees are team players and live in well-organized colonies, usually up to 40,000 to 80,000 workers in each colony, each having their own specific role to play for the benefit of the whole hive: there’s worker bee scouts who search for the best nectar and return to the hive, telling the good news through dance patterns. If the pattern is a circle dance, turning one way then the other, the flowers are close; if the pattern is in a figure eight or wag-tail dance, they are far away. The wagging indicates where the flowers are in relation to the sun. This alerts the worker bee foragers, who can travel up to 10,000 flowers a day collecting and bringing back the nectar to the hive. It is the worker bees who tend to the queen as her court, nurture her eggs, store incoming nectar and pollen, build and repair the comb. Finally too, it is the worker bee who defends the hive, while the male drone’s only job is mating with the young queens. In the end, there can exist only one queen per hive, and it is she who murders any rival queens as well as the old queen, her mother for the principle position.

The one most important contribution of the bees is to humanity’s food production and our survival as nature’s pollinator. The honeybee pollinates more flowers, nuts, fruits and vegetables than any other insect. One-third of the U.S. food supply, meaning 90 different crops, are pollinated by honeybees. Three-fourths of all plants on Earth rely on them for pollination. Bees carry pollen from sunflowers and linseed plants, which make oils, and pollinate the alfalfa, which feeds the bovines. For one pound of honey, nectar from more than 1 million flowers is collected. Bees cross-pollinate, bringing pollen from flower to flower in order that they may also reproduce.

Commercial beekeepers began noticing that large numbers of bee colonies started disappearing by the end of 2006; they reported up to 90 percent of losses. Bee colonies dying mysteriously increased in 2007 to 800,000 and in 2008 to 1 million. This colony collapse disorder epidemic appeared not only in the U.S., but in parts of Canada, Europe, Asia and South America.

China is one of the biggest exporters of honey products, and exports 90 percent of the world’s royal jelly. But in China’s Southern Sichuan Province, known for its pear crops, the bees have vanished. Orchards dot the countryside providing 80 percent of China’s pears. In the 1980s, due to uncontrolled use of pesticides, their fruit production dropped dramatically. Now, it is the farmer and his family who play the role of the honeybee. They prepare the pollen by hand, letting it dry for two days. The human pollinators use a bamboo stick with chicken feathers tied to the top to make the body of a bee. Then they dip the feathers in the dried pollen and pollinate each pear blossom one by one. In a day, a hive of bees can pollinate up to 3 million flowers in comparison to 30 trees in a day by humans.

What is causing the colonies to collapse worldwide? The award winning TV series “NATURE, The Silence of the Bees” explores probable causes: disruption of habitat through urbanization and suburbanization, a lack of diversity in nutrition, controversial chemicals and uncontrolled use of pesticides, diseases and parasites. Scientists in the film state that collapses have existed before but never like this- “…bees leaving on mass without a trace.”

What would this world be without bees? Albert Einstein has been recognized as stating this warning, “If the bee disappeared off the face of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

In my small corner of the world, I can honor the interdependent web of life by how I respond, and this spring I planted a variety of wild flowers to attract birds, butterflies and bees, used vermiculture - aka worm compost - and natural fertilizer. But what became most clear to me was in being grateful for what the bees do naturally for the existence of wildlife and all of mankind.